The Free Software Foundation Inc. (FSF) is due to release the initial draft of the GNU general public license (GPL) version
3 Monday. Software vendors and lawyers expect the draft to include a number of clarifications in the license's wording so
it can better recognize global copyright.
FSF plans to release the draft at the First International Conference for GPLv3, a two-day conference at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), where developers, companies and government agencies will meet for the first public discussion
on what the draft contains.
The GPL is the most popular license for free software and was created by Richard Stallman in 1989 for the GNU free operating
system project. Version 2 of the GPL appeared in 1991. The license gives users the right to freely study, copy, modify, reuse,
share and redistribute software. The FSF estimates that close to 75 percent of all free and open-source software (FOSS) is
distributed under the GPL.
Over the course of Monday and Tuesday, attendees will hear from Stallman, who is the FSF's founder and president, Peter Brown,
FSF executive director, and Eben Moglen, a member of FSF's board. Moglen also chairs the Software Freedom Law Center and is
a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School.
There will be a panel discussion Monday to review the so-called rationale document that accompanies the draft release, where
the authors lay out their reasons for inclusions and non-inclusions in the license. On Tuesday, there will be discussion of
specific elements of the license draft, digital rights management (DRM) and GPL 3's international implications.
"Internationalization will be a challenge because copyright law, particularly as it applies to software, does not uniformly
track U.S. law on the subject," Mark Webbink, deputy general counsel and secretary with Linux distribution company Red Hat
Inc., wrote in an e-mail interview. FSF board member Moglen has stressed the need for GPL 3 to become more legally cosmopolitan
so the license becomes more accessible to lawyers outside of the U.S.
Overall clarity in the language of the license is also very important, according to Diane Peters, general counsel with Linux
development consortium Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) Inc.
"My hope is that the revised GPL provides clarity on terms that to date have been the subject of conflicting interpretation
and ambiguity for both commercial interests as well as open-source software developers," she wrote in an e-mail interview.
A perfect example is Web services, where what is being redistributed is not a copy of the software itself, but a service based
on that software. "Companies providing Web services deserve some degree of certainty such that they can make intelligent business
decisions and understand their rights and obligations," Peters wrote.
Another area lawyers are hoping the new license will clarify how and why software under development gets pulled into the terms
of the GPL, according to Claire Philpott, a shareholder at the law firm of Lane Powell, whose practice includes intellectual
property, mergers and acquisitions.
"It remains unclear when a copyright/patent protected program is entirely subject to the GPL or when only a portion of it
is subject to the GPL (i.e., only a portion of it utilizes open source)," she wrote in an e-mail interview. Developers and
companies need more commercial certainty when entering into hybrid licensing agreements that involve the licensing of both
open-source and proprietary technology, Philpott added.
Over the course of the coming year, a "perfect storm" is brewing in relation to software licensing and patent issues, according
to Sam Greenblatt, strategic technical advisor at software vendor CA Inc. "There are three things coming at once," he said
in a phone interview Wednesday.
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